GiftWorks Pro - Features and Functionality

GiftWorks Pro uses Microsoft SQL Server database technology for improved performance, scalability, and capabilities. This allows for supporting a large capacity of donors and donations (around 100,000 to 200,000 donors and hundreds of thousands of donations)

Paging

GiftWorks Pro also includes paging when displaying lists that could include a lot of items. Examples are SmartLists, Address Validation, Transaction Register and Mailing List items.

Donor Aggregate Update and Automatic Aggregate Update

Aggregate refers to total giving, counts of giving, yearly totals etc. for your donors. The Donor Aggregate Update is an update that you would manually run from within Settings.

The Automatic Aggregate Update is a scheduled update that runs at 1am each morning. This is the recommended method.

If you change your Fiscal Year month/day in Settings, you will see the following prompt notifying you that GiftWorks needs to update the fiscal year giving totals.

The reason for this is that the current fiscal year and previous fiscal year totals could be affected by this change. You can either choose to update at that time or choose to do it manually at another time or let the automatic update run overnight if you have that feature enabled. The Aggregate update requires exclusive access to the GiftWorks database, so it will not allow you to run it if other GiftWorks users are signed in.

Backup and Restore

When you save a back up in GiftWorks Pro, you can choose a custom location to save the file to or you can let it save the to the default SQL server location. The Back up file will be a .bak file.

There is not a restore option within GiftWorks Pro. The restore process is done within Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio. This tool is included as an option in the installation file for most Microsoft SQL Server Editions. If you have Microsoft SQL Server installed but did not already install the Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio tool you will need to install it in order to restore your SQL database.